The home alarm system market is a huge market, growing at 12-15% annually. This market consists of fire alarms, burglar alarms, glass breaking alarms, and personal emergency response systems, to name but a few. Further, with only 10-12% of the home market penetrated with such home alarm systems, the market potential is tremendous. This same potential for alarm systems exists in the commercial sector, with businesses and industries accounting for a large sector of the marketplace.
All of these installations rely upon similar types of technologies, both wired and wireless, for providing an alarm to a central station that a break-in or some other type of emergency occurs. This is typically accomplished by some local detector at a window, a door, or in the ceiling, detecting the presence of an activity to be reported. The detector sends a signal to a local processor, usually on premises. That local processor then sends a signal over telephone lines or via a cellular network to a central station which is monitoring the system. The central station will then call the police, fire department, or anyone else a user has selected to notify them that an alarm has occurred.
There are many ways to send signals from the premises to a central station. A regular telephone line can be used. A cellular network can be used. A long range radio has some potential in areas of some degree of remoteness, or a dedicated line can be leased from the telephone company. The most common approach is to simply use a regular telephone line to transfer these signals.
These alarm signals work very well for reporting the particular break-in, but require a central monitoring station to interpret the results. This in turn requires that a full system be installed in a home, and the system, either wired or wireless, to link to the central station over telephone lines for that purpose.
Simultaneous with this growth of home alarm systems has been the growth of Internet access for individuals using PC's and other types of equipment. Access to the Internet is typically via a local point of presence via an Internet service provider ("ISP"). Using the Internet, an individual can literally access sites on the other side of the world from the location of the PC. If a personal computer can somehow be used for the monitoring of a home security system, the Internet can serve as the basis for transmitting a particular alarm that has sounded to a monitoring facility that can be located anywhere. Thus, the need for a central station linked to a specific telephone could potentially be eliminated in favor of Internet access to that monitoring station.